Incoming Links

• February 24th, 2021

  We are an obscure, nebulous, and nonlocal entity, but it seems right to think of it in this way. We're not exactly ancient Athens, but we are a kind of Republic of Letters on the internet, bootstrapping new circuits of virtuous freedom within a decaying old order.

• March 26th, 2021

  We are an obscure, nebulous, and nonlocal entity, but it seems right to think of it in this way. We're not exactly ancient Athens, but we are a kind of Republic of Letters on the internet, bootstrapping new circuits of virtuous freedom within a decaying old order. *

• 📙 Crippled Grace

  Since this book claims to be a work of Christian theology, it is perhaps necessary to justify my reliance on Greek sources. It is still common for Protestant and Evangelical theologians to lament the supposed Hellenization of Christianity, but the appeal to Jerusalem over Athens tends to be both anti-intellectual and totalizing, presuming that the Hebrew way of thinking is the high point of the history of ideas and that everything that follows the biblical canon is corruption and decline.

• 📙 Prayer

  Every day my vision clouds over so that I perceive nothing but a world of matter. It requires a daily act of will to remember what Paul told the sophisticated crowd in Athens: ‘[God] is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being.”’ For this reason prayer may seem strange, even embarrassing.

• 📙 The Spell of the Sensuous

  Socrates’ claim that trees have nothing to teach is a vivid indicator of the extent to which the human senses in Athens had already withdrawn from direct participation with the natural landscape.